Articles

Historically the North West has been a hub of media production but this has been recently catalysed with the birth of Media City UK. From Granada TV at the Quay Street Studios; Coronation Street, University Challenge and a whole host of TV and film has entered our screens. But now, for the first time, over half of the BBC’s staff are based outside of London and the South East.
This article is going to briefly investigate the impact this huge expansion has had on the local economy and the long-term implications it may have.
Manchester and the Northern Powerhouse
Since 2011, Media...Read More »

Prior to the start of this month, where the dotted line was signed to trigger the UK’s departure from the EU, the UK effectively sat in a Digital Single Market with the rest of Europe. Now that this bubble has burst, businesses in the UK are left with a new reality to forge through unfamiliar market conditions and political landscapes.
This is a brief article to discuss how the ecommerce market is likely to evolve over these potentially turbulent times and how businesses can be best placed in this new era for digital marketing.
Some numbers to put the words into context:
Ecommerce...Read More »

If you are an SME, you will no doubt have been told the importance of social media by your various digital marketing advisors. However, the prospect of running your own campaign can be daunting for many. Here are five things not to do when running your own social media campaign.
1. Don’t Be Scared by the Size of Competitors
While assessing the competition should be part of any competitive outreach drive, it can be daunting on social platforms. If your sector has some established players, the chances are that they will have large sets of followers and generate likes and reposts regularly. ...Read More »

In both the worlds of web design and search marketing the importance of Calls to Action (CTA) are clear. Having great CTAs enables visitors to your site, improves usability and often conversions. So, what are the key messages behind successful Calls to Action?
Loss Aversion
In a similar style to a sales pitch, creating the sense that the buyer/ user needs to act now or lose out is a proven way to generate clicks. This is because we are innately averse to loss. So, if you can give something (even if not on a restricted timeframe) people are more likely to act....Read More »

As a search marketing company, the team here at Digital State Marketing are more accustomed to thinking of social media in terms of marketing. Social platforms are a great source of information about what web users are interested in, which can be funnelled into creating great content. These platforms are also the perfect place to release these content and other marketing offers to a highly targeted audience.
While social media is not generally considered to be one of the key factors in Google’s core algorithm, its role is not fully understood by the industry. Surely, as an active traffic source, it...Read More »

If you have had a technical audit done on your website, your attention will have probably been drawn to the number of 404 errors it’s accumulated. So what are the effects of these errors on your SEO efforts?
What Are 404 Errors?
Code 404 relates to a “not found” error. Meaning that the server is working correctly but the target page could not be located. So instead of returning the desired content, a holding page is served to the user.
Returning 404 errors is an inevitable part of managing a website. As such, a great variety of styles of 404 pages have been...Read More »

As we have entered our seventh year as a search marketing company, we have noticed how much the market has changed in that time. The evolution of the metrics used to define the levels of success in a campaign, is a great example of change. It’s hard to imagine that any other metric than the eternal concept of Return On Investment (ROI). Yet while digital marketing platforms have the benefit of a very high level of traceability, it is still open to a degree of the traditional marketing’s fuzzy numbers syndrome. While the various analytics platforms have become more complex,...Read More »

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages? Well to put it in an entirely simplistic and non-technical manner, they are pages that are made using a set of rules that make the page lighter and faster to load for mobile platforms. For a far more thorough description, you could visit the AMP Project’s own website which features the full details about the required AMP HTML, AMP JS and the Google AMP cache. However, for those of you who are looking to find out what accelerated mobile pages are and if your website needs them, then that will likely be going in at...Read More »

I think it’s fair to say that most SEO companies agree, social media play a role in the wider SEM portfolio. To what degree is perhaps less of a unanimous verdict. When reading Search Engine Land recently, I came across the linked article. It raised several great points, that I think translate into SEO provision as well as the original subject of content marketing.
So here are 3 common social media mistakes that are made as part of a wider SEO strategy:
SEO Links
Even Google representatives (2015) have referenced that links still play an integral role in the core algorithm. Even noting...Read More »

Many Business Owners often fail to understand how poor online reputation management (ORM) can damage their company’s sales and image. Your online reputation can help generate trust and business while at the same time steer potential customers or clients away.
With something so simple being able to have a huge impact on a business’s potential income it comes as no surprise that there are companies out there that will help you to maintain a positive reputation while minimising the effect of negative comments.
You may have heard of the university in California which received huge negative publicity online after pictures of student...Read More »

When choosing your Digital Marketing partner one of the first questions asked will be “what will I get for my money?” If you were a Digital Marketing expert then there would be no need to go through the selection process of finding the Digital Marketing partner for you. In the selection process there will be words and phrases, SEO, key words, rankings, which you may not understand but the right partner will guide your marketing campaign through this. However, the bottom line question remains of what do I get for my money and what is the return on that investment?
Your...Read More »

Google’s Panda updates may have been with the search marketing community since February 2011 but it would now appear to have transcended its former role and become a full blown part of the core Google Algorithm. The authenticity of this statement ha
s been verified by Google’s own PR Team via a piece on the SEM Post. So unlike Penguin, which is still working on the update style of rollout, the news about Panda will go quiet as it comes under the secrecy edict of the wider core algorithm.
An interpretation of this could be that the search marketing world has broadly...Read More »

As the New Year begins and many people develop a new sense of resolve, setting themselves resolutions to improve their lives, the cynics are inevitably scoffing at their endeavors. This is perhaps due to the notorious failures of many of the stereotypical resolutions, such as the gym memberships that go unused come February or the failed resolve when faced with storing quarter of a bottle of left over Christmas sherry.
So this year why not set yourself and your business New Year’s resolutions that are both achievable and ultimately useful in the long term?
Procuring a SEO technical audit from a specialist...Read More »

Mobile and tablet devices have become increasingly popular over the past few years. With Wi-Fi becoming more and more readily available, people are becoming heavily reliant on mobile devices. For this reason, it is important for a search engine optimisation company to ensure clients’ websites are optimised for mobile users.
Google’s algorithm was updated on the 21st April 2015 to make SEO searches mobile friendly. This affected websites ranking on Google that weren’t optimised for mobile devices. So if you haven’t done so already, then make sure your website is mobile optimized and increase your rank on Google. Read on for...Read More »

Using social media is a great way of promoting your brand as it gives you the opportunity to target scores of people at once. Shares on social media allow your content to spread even further, as they allow users to let their friends know about your brand too. Each time a piece of your content is shared, there is the possibility for hundreds of new potential customers to see it, and yet hundreds more if any of those people share it too. This means your social media presence has the potential to become a serious method of advertising, provided your...Read More »

To improve your search marketing, link building is a great way to increase traffic towards your website and improve your ranking on Google. There are two types of links; natural (organic) and unnatural links. Natural links can increase the ranking of a website whereas an unnatural link can often be seen by Google as spam, resulting in negative effects on ranking. For more information please read on.
Natural (organic) vs Unnatural ‘Spam’ Links
Natural links usually provide high quality and original content. These links can be in the form of direct links from quality sites, ideally with high domains, or shares and...Read More »

When it comes to ranking your website well across all search engines, there are two key factors which should be concentrated on:
• ensuring that the website is SEO friendly
• providing the visitor with a simple yet enjoyable user experience
There isn’t much point in trying to rank a website that’s SEO friendly if the user experience feels terrible and vice versa because these can both have positive and negative effects towards each other.
There are two different types of sitemaps, which can often lead to confusion over which one a website needs. The simple answer is both, as the two benefit your...Read More »

Social media is an essential factor to search engine optimisation in the UK. Social media has grown significantly in the past few years and it looks like it is here to stay. Because social media is so huge, it is advised that businesses use these platforms to their advantage. A social media site is a representation of your business, so it should remain professional and accurate to your brand. Please read on for more information on how social media can improve search engine optimisation in the UK.
To get the most out of social media, it is important to understand the...Read More »

You are probably working hard on an SEO and marketing strategy aiming to bring new and repeat customers to your website. However high your levels of traffic, the key area is if this traffic converts. If the traffic doesn’t convert, then these efforts are potentially wasted. This is where search marketing CRO comes in. CRO (conversion rate optimisation) used to be judged as a separate entity to SEO, but increasingly there are overlaps between the two. Both elements are important if you want to drive traffic to your site that converts.
At Digital State Marketing we have come up with 5...Read More »

One of the most important aspect of an SEO technical audit is your page speed. This is one of the most important factors Google is pushing at the moment, getting this right goes along way to having a technical compliant website.
PageSpeed Insights from inside the Google Search Console, is the most efficient way of seeing how Google rates your site’s performance. One of the most common problems that website fail with this audit is render-blocking resources.
In the example above there are numerous JavaScript and CSS files which are having to be downloaded on the webpage before the browser can render/show the...Read More »